Zaina Orbai has been part of two of the most studied scaling stories in retail and tech. As Chief People Officer at The RealReal, she has helped lead the company through rapid growth and a successful IPO. Before that, as Vice President of People Operations at Yelp, she scaled the company from pre-IPO through to more than 5,000 employees. Her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture explored the underrated work that makes both stories possible: the deliberate, ongoing investment in effective leaders at every level of the organization.
Her experience supporting The RealReal also shows up in their broader story as an AllVoices customer. The RealReal's success story with our investigations and case management capabilities is part of how they scaled HR practice across a fast-growing workforce, and it sits inside the broader leadership work Zaina has championed.
Why Leadership Investment Is the Quiet Compounder
Most companies underinvest in leadership development for the same reason most people underinvest in saving early. The returns are slow, the costs are immediate, and the comparisons across companies are easy to misread. HBR research on leadership development programs shows that effective programs can substantially boost individual growth and well-being but only when implemented with operational seriousness, not as standalone training events.
Gallup research on managerial development shows that workers with effective managers are nearly twice as likely to feel satisfied at work and more than twice as likely to feel a deep sense of commitment. The compounding effect is enormous. The reason it goes underutilized is that the investment looks indirect when leaders are deciding where to spend each quarter.
What Investing in Leaders Actually Looks Like
Where do you start when leaders are stretched thin?
Zaina's approach is to invest in the manager population first, especially newly promoted managers. Most management problems show up in the first 18 months of a manager's tenure, and most companies provide almost no support during that window. Investing in early-career manager development produces compounding returns through better team performance, lower attrition, and stronger downstream pipelines.
How do you scale leadership development across a fast-growing company?
By treating it as infrastructure, not as a series of programs. The mature pattern includes regular cohort-based development, ongoing coaching access, peer learning groups, and explicit performance criteria for inclusive and effective leadership. Situational leadership and transformational leadership frameworks can be useful starting points, but the operational practice matters more than the theoretical framework.
What Actually Works in Leader Development
Principle 1: Build executive development as an ongoing practice
One-off executive education events rarely change behavior. Sustained, structured development that integrates with real strategic priorities does. Companies that invest in ongoing senior leader development see better strategic alignment, better cross-functional collaboration, and stronger talent pipelines.
Principle 2: Treat mentoring as a real management practice
Sponsorship and mentoring drive meaningful development outcomes. The companies that build them into the operating model see retention and growth benefits that programs alone cannot deliver. Senior leaders who mentor visibly create the cultural norm that other leaders adopt.
Principle 3: Use ER and case data to identify where leadership development is needed
Patterns in ER cases often reveal where specific leaders need development. AllVoices' workplace investigations and AI Co-Pilot capabilities help HR teams see where case clusters indicate management gaps that targeted development can address. That data-driven approach to development beats generic training every time.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Leader development sits inside broader investments in human resources and employee relations. The companies that get the most out of leader development connect it to ER and engagement signals. Manager-level case patterns reveal which leaders need support. Engagement scores by team reveal which managers are succeeding. The data-informed approach replaces guesswork with targeted action.
How HR connects leader development to outcomes
The mature pattern is to track development outcomes alongside business outcomes. Manager-led team engagement scores. Voluntary attrition by manager. Internal promotion rates from manager-led teams. ER case patterns at the manager level. Looking at these together produces a clear picture of which leaders are producing the outcomes the company wants and which need targeted support.
Frequently Asked Questions About Investing in Effective Leaders
What is the highest-impact leadership investment?
New manager development. The first 18 months of management determine whether someone becomes an effective leader or replicates the worst patterns they experienced. Investing in that window pays back faster than any other leader investment.
How do you measure whether leader development is working?
Watch outcomes, not participation. Engagement scores on manager-led teams. Voluntary turnover by manager. Promotion rates from teams led by developed managers. Internal mobility data. Real development changes those metrics over time. Programs that do not change those metrics need redesign.
How do you handle leaders who resist development?
Make development a performance expectation, not an option. Companies that get serious about leadership treat development as part of the manager role, not as an optional add-on. Leaders who resist often need different conversations, not different programs.
What about senior leaders who think they have already learned everything?
Senior leaders are often the ones who need development most. The work of senior leadership requires continuous adaptation, especially at companies going through significant change. The companies that get this right design senior leader development that is challenging, peer-based, and explicitly tied to current strategic priorities.
How do you balance leader development with operational urgency?
Treat them as connected. The leaders who can handle operational urgency are the ones who have invested in their own development. Cutting development to focus on urgency usually trades short-term cost savings for long-term capability gaps. The mature pattern is to integrate development with the operational work, not to choose between them.
How do you build a leadership bench that survives turnover at the top?
By investing in depth, not just stars. The companies that handle senior turnover well have multiple credible candidates for each senior role, with explicit development paths, exposure to strategic work, and sponsorship from multiple senior leaders. The pattern of investing only in a few designated successors produces fragility. The pattern of building broad leadership depth produces resilience that pays off when transitions inevitably happen.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Zaina's experience scaling HR through two significant growth stories makes a clear argument. Investment in effective leaders is the quiet compounder that determines whether companies sustain their growth or burn out their people. The work is concrete: structured manager development, ongoing senior leader investment, sponsorship and mentoring as operational practices, and data-driven targeting based on real signals from ER and engagement.
The deeper truth is that leadership is built deliberately or not at all. Companies that invest end up with the kind of leadership bench that handles growth, change, and crisis. Companies that do not end up with leaders who learned by trial and error, often at the cost of the people they led. The HR teams that take leader development seriously are quietly building the most important capability in the organization.
Leadership investment also tends to be one of the most underleveraged competitive advantages in any industry. Most companies say they value leaders. Few companies invest at the level the work actually requires. The companies that do the work consistently end up with leadership benches that can handle whatever comes next, which is increasingly the deciding factor in whether organizations sustain growth through the kind of change every company will eventually face.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams turn leader development into a measurable, signal-driven practice.
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